M. David StoneEpson WorkForce Pro WF-4630The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630 is a good fit as a workhorse printer in a micro or small office, with impressively fast speed and a long list of multifunction printer features.

Although graphics quality is good enough for most internal business needs, it's also a bit below par.

Bottom Line

The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630 is a good fit as a workhorse printer in a micro or small office, with impressively fast speed and a long list of multifunction printer features.

The WorkForce Pro WF-4630 ($299.99) isn't the first multifunction printer (MFP) we've tested that's built around Epson's new, highly touted PrecisionCore technology. It is the first we've seen, though, that actually delivers on the promise of PrecisionCore, with impressively fast speed. Add in the low running cost and the long list of multifunction printer features, and the WF-4630 is a top choice for a workhorse MFP in a micro or small office.

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The building block of PrecisionCore technology is a print chip that can be combined with other print chips in a single printhead. Each chip adds more ink nozzles, which lets the printer put more ink on paper at once to print pages faster. Printers with only two chips, like the Epson WorkForce WF-3640, don't do much to distinguish themselves from traditional inkjets. On the other hand, printers with four chips, like the WF-4630, stand out from the pack with notably fast speed.

The BasicsAside from differences in speed, the WF-4630 offers most of the same features as the Epson WF-3640. It can print and fax from, as well as scan to, a computer, including over a network, it can work as a standalone copier and fax machine, and it can print from and scan to a USB memory key. It also offers a 3.5-inch color touch screen, with a well-designed set of menus.

You can use Ethernet or Wi-Fi to connect the printer to a network, letting you print from iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Kindle Fire devices through a Wi-Fi access point. It also lets you print through the cloud and scan directly to any of several cloud services (Box, Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive), assuming the network is connected to the Internet. If you connect by USB cable to a single PC instead, you can't use the cloud-based features, but you can still print from a mobile device by using Wi-Fi Direct to connect directly to the printer.

Paper HandlingThe WF-4630's paper handling is best described as just short of excellent, with a 250-sheet front drawer and an 80-sheet rear tray, for a 330-sheet total capacity. That makes it easy to keep two kinds of paper loaded and switch between them easily, but it's not quite as suitable for heavy-duty needs as two 250-sheet trays would be. Very much on the plus side, there's also a built-in duplexer (for two sided printing).

For scanning, the printer offers a letter-size flatbed and a 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) that handles up to legal size paper and also duplexes, turning the page over to scan the second side. Duplex scanning combined with duplex printing lets you copy both single and double-sided documents to your choice of single or double-sided copies.

Setup, Speed, and Output QualityAt 13.5 by 18.1 by 16.6 inches (HWD), even with the output tray closed, the WF-4630 is a little bigger than you might want sitting on your desk, and at 31 pounds 5 ounces, it's heavy enough that you might want some help moving it into place. However, setup is standard fare. For my tests, I connected it to a wired network and installed the drivers and software on a Windows Vista system.

On our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), the WF-4630 came in at an impressively fast 10.2 pages per minute (ppm). That makes it nearly twice as fast as the similarly priced HP Officejet Pro 8620 e-All-in-One. It's also nearly twice as fast as the Epson WF-3640, at 5.4ppm, which makes sense, since its printhead includes twice as many print chips.

Output quality for the WF-4630 is a bit of a mixed bag. Text quality overall is the best I've ever seen from an inkjet in its default mode, with crisp, readable characters even at small font sizes. Unfortunately, the tops of the characters in some text lines were offset slightly from the bottom, most likely because of two sweeps of the printhead not being precisely aligned. The issue cropped up so rarely in my tests that it shouldn't be a problem for typical business use, but if you need absolutely top-tier text, even an occasional glitch can ruin the effect.

Graphics quality is easily good enough for any internal business need, but with some obvious banding in large areas of dark colors, including black, dark green, and dark red. Using the matte presentation paper that Epson recommends for most photo printing, the output was at the high end of the quality you would expect from drugstore prints. If you expect photos to have a glossy finish, however, you may not like the look of the matte paper, in which case you can use one of Epson's glossy papers.

Another plus for the WF-4630 is its low running cost. Based on Epson's claimed yields and ink costs, the cost per page works out to just 1.6 cents for monochrome and 8.2 cents for color. In comparison, the cost per page for the Epson 3640 is 3.2 cents for monochrome and 11.4 cents for color.

The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630 offers a lot, despite the uneven output quality. If you need consistently good text, or a higher paper capacity, you'll be better off with the Epson WF-3640, our Editors' Choice for heavy-duty MFP for a micro office. However if you expect to print enough pages for the WF-4630's low cost per page to add up to a significant savings, and you don't mind an occasional line of text with the top slightly offset from the bottom, the WF-4630 can be an excellent fit as a workhorse printer in a micro or small office.

About the Author

M. David Stone is an award-winning freelance writer and computer industry consultant. Although a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a top company in the gaming industry. David is also an expert in imaging technologies (including printers, moni... See Full Bio

Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630

Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630

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